[pyre]

It's a question of "do you charge 3% more for credit card payments to cover the charges from the credit card companies, but leave off that fee for non-credit card payments?"

Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea. IIRC, this stuff is usually handled in your contract with the credit card processor.

The last company that I worked for that used a credit card processor other than Stripe, the rules were something like:

* 2-3% of the transaction is the processor's keep

* You are allowed to charge a surcharge, but _only_ if it's a flat fee. You cannot add a 2-3% fee to cover the credit card charges, nor can you have some sort of "flat-fee schedule" where the flat-fee changes based on the amount being charged (e.g. charges of $1 - $100 get a $0.50 fee, but charges $100+ get a $5 fee). You can only do something like $0.50 fee to all charges.

* You cannot charge a different price for products when they are purchased via credit card.

[slice_of_life]

>Most credit card companies _don't_ want you to do that because charging more to pay with a credit card makes using your credit card a less enticing idea.

This is obviously good for the card companies and to a degree the digital payments landscape as a whole.

I do however see how it can be a problem for small merchants who can't negotiate for better rates with MAPs due to lack of volume. A 2 - 3% fee is quite significant seeing as though many retailers will have a 7-12% net margin. For a merchant not to be able to push the cost to a customer even if it is just part of it would be difficult for a business to sustain. There are other costs that merchants are dealing with such as cost of packaging and as such, a 2-3% fee is no mean feat.

[pyre]

Well, you're also missing things like the onerous process that some of the processors would have you go through to sign up. While I haven't been the person to actually setup a Stripe account, my impression is that it's pretty light-weight. From what I remember the business people having to go through to sign up for a merchant account with a processor (for a 100% online business) back in ~2010, it was practically like signing up for a mortgage. There was also back-and-forth between different "levels" of employees on the other side of things. At one point, IIRC the process even stalled because their end stopped responding to enquiries from our company. On top of that we were forced to use their Java middleware crap even though we weren't a Java shop. They made you feel like they couldn't care less about your business.

[slice_of_life]

Well, the onboarding process in the past you've described seems like hell. May be merchants should simply accept to bite the bullet on this one and accept it as part of the cost of doing business.

Now that you've mentioned stripe; I am in the process of setting up an Australian company with stripe; so far the docs are easy to digest and it seems waaay easier (and cleaner) than my previous experience with paypal.